An Autonomous System for Head-to-Head Race: Design, Implementation and Analysis; Team KAIST at the Indy Autonomous Challenge

While the majority of autonomous driving research has concentrated on everyday driving scenarios, further safety and performance improvements of autonomous vehicles require a focus on extreme driving conditions. In this context, autonomous racing is a new area of research that has been attracting considerable interest recently. Due to the fact that a vehicle is driven by its perception, planning, and control limits during racing, numerous research and development issues arise. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the autonomous racing system built by team KAIST for the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC). Our autonomy stack consists primarily of a multi-modal perception module, a high-speed overtaking planner, a resilient control stack, and a system status manager. We present the details of all components of our autonomy solution, including algorithms, implementation, and unit test results. In addition, this paper outlines the design principles and the results of a systematical analysis. Even though our design principles are derived from the unique application domain of autonomous racing, they can also be applied to a variety of safety-critical, high-cost-of-failure robotics applications. The proposed system was integrated into a full-scale autonomous race car (Dallara AV-21) and field-tested extensively. As a result, team KAIST was one of three teams who qualified and participated in the official IAC race events without any accidents. Our proposed autonomous system successfully completed all missions, including overtaking at speeds of around $220 km/h$ in the IAC@CES2022, the world's first autonomous 1:1 head-to-head race.

Zero-shot Triplet Extraction by Template Infilling

Triplet extraction aims to extract entities and their corresponding relations in unstructured text. Most existing methods train an extraction model on high-quality training data, and hence are incapable of extracting relations that were not observed during training. Generalizing the model to unseen relations typically requires fine-tuning on synthetic training data which is often noisy and unreliable. In this paper, we argue that reducing triplet extraction to a template filling task over a pre-trained language model can equip the model with zero-shot learning capabilities and enable it to leverage the implicit knowledge in the language model. Embodying these ideas, we propose a novel framework, ZETT (ZEro-shot Triplet extraction by Template infilling), that is based on end-to-end generative transformers. Our experiments show that without any data augmentation or pipeline systems, ZETT can outperform previous state-of-the-art models with 25% less parameters. We further show that ZETT is more robust in detecting entities and can be incorporated with automatically generated templates for relations.